Looking to L.A. for political future

November 14, 2008|By TIM RUTTEN Los Angeles Times

America has long scouted Los Angeles for cultural signposts to the new. The results of last week's election might have put the city on the country's political cutting edge as well. Analysts parsing the components of President-elect Barack Obama's decisive victory have begun to believe that the campaign ended in a "realigning election," reshaping the nation's political map like the ones that brought Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to power. If that is the case, then several of the trends that pushed Obama to victory showed themselves first in L.A. One is the continuing movement of affluent, better-educated voters and suburban residents into the Democratic column -- a trend that has been visible in L.A. for years. Suburban voters went strongly for Obama nationally and overwhelmingly in Los Angeles. Another clearly marked signpost to the future was Hispanic participation, which has been growing in Los Angeles for decades but which surged to historic levels across the country in this election cycle, according to an unusually comprehensive exit poll conducted by Loyola Marymount University's Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles under the direction of Fernando Guerra. No one predicted at the campaign's outset that more than six out of 10 Hispanic voters would cast their ballots for the first black president, but they did. The significance of that landslide was amplified by Hispanics being clustered in the Western states that Obama pried from the red column. Seventy-three percent of Colorado's Hispanics went for the Democratic candidate, as did 76 percent of Nevada's and 69 percent of New Mexico's. More striking, Hispanics helped deliver to Obama two of the three Sunbelt states crucial to Reagan's first realigning victory. In California, 77 percent of Hispanics went for the Democrat, as did 57 percent of Florida's. Even the third, Texas, seems to be teetering on the blue precipice. It's hard to believe that little more than a decade ago, many analysts were predicting that Hispanics, mainly Catholic and socially conservative, would be irresistibly drawn into the Republican orbit, much as Italian Americans of similar background had been after World War II in Eastern states. So what happened? Two things: immigration and organized labor. Beginning in 1994, when then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, made support for a ballot proposition that denied health, education and other benefits to undocumented immigrants a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, Hispanics across the country have been moving as far from Republican candidates as their legs will carry them. To see just how far, Loyola's Guerra and his associate, Jennifer Magnabosco, were asked to break out the votes of Protestant -- mainly evangelical -- and immigrant Hispanics who voted in Los Angeles on Nov. 4. The notion was that these two groups would make up the most socially conservative members of their ethnic community. The Loyola exit poll found that only 18 percent of L.A. Hispanics voted for John McCain; just half of them were Protestants. That was true even though 47 percent of Hispanic Protestants favored a ballot measure that required that parents of teenagers seeking abortion be notified, and an overwhelming 61 percent favored the ban on same-sex marriage. So much for the link between religiously based Hispanic social conservatism and Republican sympathy, but what about newly naturalized citizens? According to the Loyola survey, 21 percent of all foreign-born L.A. voters backed McCain, but only 18 percent of foreign-born Hispanics did. In fact, Hispanics born outside the U.S. went for Obama by a slightly greater margin than native-born Hispanic Americans -- 78 percent to 76 percent. Loyola's poll also turned up something else that ought to concern GOP strategists: In a campaign marked by widespread indecision into the eleventh hour, 86 percent of U.S.-born Hispanic Angelenos and 77 percent of naturalized Hispanic citizens reported they decided to vote for Obama more than two weeks before Election Day. Loyola's findings also tend to support research done by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center that shows Hispanic social conservatism is at its apogee in the immigrant generation -- about 4 of 10 Hispanics in the U.S. are foreign born -- and declines until it becomes indistinguishable from the attitudes of white Americans in the third generation. Although 56 percent of L.A.'s Hispanic voters favored parental notification, only 40 percent of the native born did. Similarly, 60 percent of naturalized voters endorsed the ban on same-sex marriage, and 51 percent of the native born opposed it. If you're a Republican strategist, you need to weigh all this against two facts: By 2050, according to the Census Bureau, 1 in 4 Americans will be a Hispanic. One of the other significant trends in this election was the surge in young voters; one third of the voters under 29 were members of minority groups, mainly Hispanics. Political history is a funny thing. Who would have guessed that Pete Wilson would be one of the architects of Barack Obama's victory? Tim Rutten is a Times columnist. E-mail him at timothy.rutten@latimes.com.